The rhetoric of triangulation: a Zack Polanski case study

A cynical inconsistency of political presentation makes it difficult to construct a programme for government that cuts through the aggressive, communications-driven strategies of triangulated messages

“When everyone feels free to tell you the truth, respect for you dwindles… A wise prince should take another course: choose wise men for your advisors, and allow only them the liberty of speaking the truth to the prince, and only on matters about which you ask, and nothing else. But you should question them about everything, listen patiently to their opinions, then form your own conclusions later.” Niccolo Machiavelli

We, probably vaguely, remember the “third way” and the concept of “triangulation” as important features of Tony Blair’s repositioning of the Labour Party. The idea of triangulation is to break the binary nature of political discourse explicit in the contest between socialism and capitalism, left versus right. The principle here is founded on the assumption that most of the public sit in a vaguely defined ‘middle ground’ between left and right and, as Bill Clinton’s advisor (and former Republican) Dick Morris described, cherry pick the good bits from each side’s policies and platforms. While the approach does have merits it suffers from a related syndrome best set out in the joke about the preacher telling his congregants to stick to the narrow path between good and evil.

Today, triangulation is more a feature of retail politics, rhetoric and marketing rather than as a wider political strategy: ‘not X, not Y, but Z’. The politician, knowing his or her audiences, seeks to square the circle between competing expectations from those audiences. So nationalist politicians wise enough to know that free trade works will construct a position that speaks of trade in patriotic terms rather than in its correct liberal usage. And for the left, in the manner of Ken Livingstone’s 1980s ‘rainbow coalition’, policies are crafted to target different ‘progressive’ audiences (LGBT, ethnic minorities, feminists, social housing tenants and so forth) which are then validated by identifying a set of shared enemies (landlords, Tories, bankers, the rich, America). The objective is to sustain your coalition by focusing their anger on the shared enemies so as to gloss over the huge differences in expectations between the groups making up the coalition.

The risk with these strategies, both the broader ‘third way’ programme and the more common approach to political communications is that the politician ends up in the manner of mankind using the babel fish as proof of God’s non-existence: “Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.” Desperate to make sure all the audiences are ticked off, the politician ends up sounding ridiculous. Here’s Green Party leader Zack Polanski doing some geopolitical triangulation:

“I was asked over and over again who I thought was worse, Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump. My answer has always been, I don’t think it’s helpful to compare oppression. All oppression is oppression. I think my answer is even more nuanced. Now, though, as horrendous as Vladimir Putin is and as despicable as his crimes are, I’ve never seen him threaten genocide. I’ve never seen him threaten to wipe out a civilization. I’ve never seen Keir Starmer claim we have a special relationship with Vladimir Putin as we shouldn’t, or that he’s our ally, but we have with Donald Trump. Where is the moral consistency here with a man who is literally threatening genocide? What was Keir Starmer’s reaction to that? On the day Trump threatened genocide, Keir Starmer tweeted or posted about Wireless festival, a music festival in the UK. There was no condemnation whatsoever from Keir Starmer that I saw anyway about what he was threatening to do in Iran, nor what is happening in Lebanon or Gaza. I think that’s despicable. And so I think, at this point, it’s not that Donald Trump is more of a danger than Vladimir Putin but I think Keir Starmer’s commitment to a so-called special relationship with Donald Trump is more of a danger to British people than what Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine, which also, by the way, is vile and needs to be stopped. But if we want to get into comparisons, I’m actually more concerned at this point about Keir Starmer’s relationship with Donald Trump”

Polanski has a coalition of support which he feels is motivated more by anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment than it is by concern about the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict. And Polanski therefore wants to make out that Putin’s endeavour to extinguish the idea of Ukraine and being Ukrainian is less problematic than Donald Trump’s bombast or Israel’s self-defence. In doing so, however, Polanski manages to trap himself in the argument that Britain having a positive relationship with the USA is more problematic than Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine with main force. We can appreciate that Polanski’s main target (and an easy one right now) is Keir Starmer but also see that the Green Party leader has also trapped himself into being seen as an apologist for Russia and Putin.

Polanski performs the same contortions when asked about the overt antisemitism seen from some of his supporters and activists:

“I’m concerned about rising antisemitic attacks. We saw arson attacks on ambulances for instance and we know that increasingly jewish communities are feeling unsafe. There’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety, but neither are acceptable”

As with the Putin comments Polanski provides himself with cover by describing perceptions of ‘unsafety’ as unacceptable but then the Green Party leader explains and the triangulation problem kicks in because he knows that, while he may be a Jew, a big and important audience for his message really doesn’t like Israel and Jews. The audience represented by his deputy leader. So Polanski cavils:

“He also said that although he takes antisemitism allegations against candidates of his party seriously, there have been “increasingly weaponized, cynical political attacks from the Labour Party”.”

Polanski’s argument is that we need to be more ‘nuanced’ about antisemitism, a position that resulted in him, in essence, arguing that, despite the Equalities Commission saying otherwise, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party wasn’t institutionally antisemitic. While Polanski’s personal Jewishness provides him with cover, his need to defend the anti-Jew views of those who are in his party because of his deputy leader creates another communications contortion for the party that probably can’t be resolved by saying ‘as a Jew’.

The Greens have faced the same problems over issues like trans rights and drugs liberalisation but the heart of the party’s challenge is the impossible task of marrying a geopolitical position that garners votes from socially conservative audiences with a domestic position featuring injustice of private renting, the terrible idea of building new houses on Green Belt and the lie that all the money can come from taxing the rich. None of this survives contact with reality but, as we’ve seen with Polanski’s justification for antisemitism and anti-Americanism, this matters little so long as the party can keep the different parts of its coalition from finding out the bits of its policy platform that they won’t like.

The problem for Polanski is that each of these clever - nuanced is a word he likes - positions sets a plate spinning and, because the whole agenda is based on stroking the love buttons of different audiences, at some point one or more of the plates smashes to the ground. The Green Party, once a bunch of lentil-knitting environmentalists, has adopted the left’s game of identity top trumps and relies almost entirely on the extent to which Zack Polanski’s gift of the gab keeps those plates spinning. Polanski’s approach, as we’ve seen several times in media appearances (most notably in an exchange with Ed Balls on Good Morning Britain) is to change the subject, deflect or shoot the messenger. It is great short term politics to tell objectors and critics of Green policies that they are ‘rattled’ but Polanski, as someone from Manchester, should know ‘attack, attack, attack’ is built on a sound defence.

Blair’s ‘third way’ was an authentic attempt to resolve the dilemma of social democracy (free markets work, free markets make people richer, free markets have losers). Zack Polanski’s Green Party isn’t an authentic, intelligent programme to resolve society’s problems but (something it shares with Nigel Farage’s Reform) an endeavour to convert real anger and grievance into votes. So far the rhetorical triangulation is working but its essential contradictions mean that it must fall apart. We see these contradictions again with Green MP, Hannah Spencer coming over all shocked about there being bars in the House of Commons while representing a party with a policy on hard drugs like heroin that says this:

“The Green Party advocates for a public health approach to drug policy, aiming to end prohibition and replace it with a system of legal regulation.

Under the leadership of Zack Polanski (elected September 2025), the party has increasingly pushed for the legalisation of all drugs, including Class A substances like heroin and cocaine, to disrupt illegal markets and prioritize treatment over criminalisation.”

Of course the argument here isn’t that drugs are good but that drug users and many drug dealers are not evil criminals but the exploited victims of red in tooth and claw criminal capitalism. Whereas it is a terrible thing to have a glass of beer or wine while going through the boring task of voting according to the instructions from your parliamentary whip. The problem is that the petty fussbucketry of Spencer’s comments contrast with the libertine nature of wider policy (as well as the misperception that drug users are always victims).

All political parties are coalitions held together by a shared enemy or enemies. The bickering marriage in the Tory Party between national liberals and conservatives was sustained by their shared hatred of socialism and the Labour Party held together a collection of Marxists, social democrats and pragmatists on a shared dislike of Tories and big business. These coalitions required the careful triangulation of policy - some red meat for the far left or the hard right and technocratic fudge for the pragmatic careerists. But when your coalition combines Jew-hating Muslim extremists with anti-capitalist younger people, renters and trans activists, the triangulation gets a little more difficult and, as the Greens are beginning to discover, takes you into problematic areas such as, for example, the equating of anti-capitalism with anti-zionism.

Rhetorical triangulation is the means by which these groups with different (even competing) aims are kept within the coalition. It is why the Greens in my ward don’t mention Gaza, rent controls or indeed any actual policy except stopping new house building, whereas a mile or two away in Heaton the streets are littered with Green Party literature speaking of little else but Israel, Iran and Gaza. All political coalitions have to manufacture third positions but the bigger the contrast between the ends of different groups within a coalition, the harder it becomes to sustain those positions. Zack Polanski finds himself alongside both the far left and the far right in arguing that Putin and the Islamist regime are not as morally bad as Donald Trump and the USA. The coalition is sustained, at the cost of seeming favourable to Putin’s aggression, by playing to the essential anti-Americanism of young graduates and the Jew-hate of many Muslims.

In the end something breaks. Either a different retail political product targets part of the coalition (the Muslim Gaza vote already has such an offer in places like Bradford and Birmingham and we see a comparable impact on Reform from Rupert Lowe’s more overtly white supremacist Restore party) or else the consistent deflection of policy contradictions results in less committed supporters drifting away to other parties. But the cynical inconsistency of political presentation remains and, in doing so, makes it ever more difficult to construct a programme for government that cuts through the aggressive, communications-driven political strategies of triangulated messages targeted to carefully curated audiences and based on identity, prejudice and ignorance.